Live your best possible life. How good can it get?

Posts tagged ‘rats’

“I believe we will continue to find increasingly strong reasons to believe that some of the strange effects observable in the microscopic world exist not only in the exotic realms, but also in more intimate domain of human experience. I also believe that the implications of all this for understanding psi are sufficiently remote from engrained ways of thinking that the first reaction will be confidence that it’s wrong. The second will be horror that it might be right. The third will be boredom because it’s obvious.” — Dean Radin

At first glance, entangled diamonds and altruistic rats don’t seem to have much in common, yet once we’ve taken a closer look, we can begin to notice how in a universe where everything exists as vibration, some vibrations occur harmonically across space and time in ways that resonance is achieved and information is exchanged.

On the physics front, recent groundbreaking experiments at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England have successfully demonstrated that two physically separated diamonds vibrated together when only one of them was zapped with an ultrashort laser. This kind of entanglement has been previously witnessed only at the quantum level… which is in a microscopically small realm beyond reach of our ordinary range of sensory perception. What’s so exciting about these experiments is how they move the wild and woolly world of quantum mechanics into our everyday world of objects we can touch, taste, smell, hear and feel.

Quantum entanglement is one of those strange behaviors that physicist Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” and like quantum teleportation and quantum tunneling, quantum entanglement is something seldom acknowledged on the macroscopic scale. Scientific successes in observing quantum weirdness with things larger than quantum particles initiates a paradigm shift to better assumptions about our world, such as: the energy of things matters as much as the material; non-local effects can be profound; observers influence experimental results; and some outcomes are best described in terms of probabilities.

Diamonds were selected for this entanglement study for their crystalline nature… yet we see evidence of the biological equivalent of entanglement in neurons. Over the past decade, some neurological researchers have suggested a theory that the presence of mirror neurons might help explain empathy because mirror neurons enable a person to know how someone feels by watching them, allowing that person to literally feel what they are feeling. Psychologists often conduct psychology experiments with rats, which have a special place in my heart, as my daughters had pet rats when they were young and we learned first-hand what wonderful pets they make.

Rats are highly intelligent social creatures that can form strong bonds with rats and people, as my daughters and I learned one day when our lost pet rat came bounding home after four days out in the world on her own. While I was amazed that our pet rat survived four days in the great big world on her own, my daughter explained that she’d never lost confidence in her rat returning, because, “I told her to come back home, and she did.”

The exciting news from recent studies with rats comes from University of Chicago neuroscientists Peggy Mason, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, and Jean Decety who conducted an experiment with rats in which rats had an opportunity to free a rat trapped in a plexiglass cage, and a majority of the rats learned how to open the cage and free the other rat. Rats did not free similarly caged toy rats, and when given a dilemma between opening a locked cage containing special chocolate treats and freeing a trapped rat, rats typically chose to free the trapped rat and share the chocolate treats.

The implications of these entangled diamonds and altruistic rat studies are truly profound, as it’s clear that we are now entering a time when we can feel awe and wonder at witnessing “some of the strange effects observable in the microscopic world” that Dr. Dean Radin presciently predicted we’d encounter… which invites all of us to re-envision a more unified universe in which we may be more and better connected to one another than we’ve ever previously conceived possible.

On a personal level, one of the things I love most about the experimental results with entangled diamonds and altruistic rats is how they drive home the point that no matter how alone or trapped we may feel, chances are there’s someone out there who empathizes with what we’re going through, and truly cares. On a global level, one of the things I love most about being on this threshold of a whole new way of envisioning a more unified world is that humanity is being given a huge opportunity to expand our awareness of who we are and what we are capable of being and doing. And all of this helps expand what we imagine possible when we contemplate my favorite meditative question, “How good can it get?!”